During a recent edition of his “Grilling JR” podcast, Jim Ross discussed Todd Grisham’s claim that Vince McMahon advised him to temper his enthusiasm over Christian Cage’s WWE return following his departure to TNA years earlier.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On Vince McMahon instructing Todd Grisham to not be excited: “Now how do you figure that out? How does that make any common sense? It doesn’t make any common sense. You hire talent for one reason: to get them over so they can contribute to your brand. How in the hell — how would Todd Grisham know how to do that anyway? Just to lay out, you could lay out, it’s simple enough. But you know, I don’t know. I think that was just asinine. It’s just — Vince had a hard on for Christian. I don’t know why. I really don’t. I really don’t know why, but he did.
“If I could’ve — back when I was the Head of Talent Relations, it didn’t seem to bother us as much, because I just kept pushing forward. I kept booking him. Then when you get the agent reports about the house show… he had one of the best matches on the card every single night, no matter who he was booked with. So if I — who else could protect John Cena better than Christian? Nobody. And there’s a skill, that’s a skill, and everybody doesn’t have it. But Vince just never did see it, and sometimes when he gets something in his mind about failure, that’s what he’s going to go — that’s where you can go to that example and say, ‘Well, that made no sense. Why did that happen?’ Well, that was during Laurinaitis’ run. It shouldn’t have happened at all. It was just silly. It was childish, and Vince could be that way.”
On never being in a position to downplay a talent’s return: “I never heard that. He never told me that, Vince didn’t. I called the matches just like I saw them. I tried to add some reality and some believability to it. And I wasn’t going to play that f**king game. I was not going to see a talent working his as* off, taking bumps. You know, a guy with a bad back, we can’t forget that. And he worked his a*s off. He bumped for everybody, he led matches. The heels, traditionally — it’s not always that way. But the heels traditionally call the match… It just amazed me. It still amazes me how Vince looked at Christian. It’s a head-scratcher, for sure.”
